>The default mode is what happens when you stop interfering. This sounds reasonable, but it seems that the 'default' state of humans is to interfere, to change

>The default mode is what happens when you stop interfering. This sounds reasonable, but it seems that the 'default' state of humans is to interfere, to change their environment and process it with human labour. Accepting that, any talk of a 'default' state of life is metaphysical and removed from the actual reality of human production. The state of wealth being a default or not (in the relative sense) is contingent on the true default of human labour and appropriating nature. The state of wealth being a default or not (in the absolute sense) doesn't provide any new information. Humans need to make things to have wealth. >If wealth was the default, we'd just need to take care not to do some certain things that would change it, and had it happened, we'd just need to stop doing those things for it to automatically return to the default state. Why is this an important point to make? Even Marx famously claimed (in defence of his theory of value) that every society must constantly maintain itself, or it will perish within a week. Others have gone further and argued that society must constantly maintain its ideology and relations of production too, not merely the fact of production. It's unclear who denies that society needs constant maintenance and improvement, even just to stay in the same state.